A leaf of 12th century homilies

[Carolingian Homiletic fragment]. A large leaf from a Latin Homiliary.

€ 9.500,00

A leaf from a Carolingian homiliary, and a very imposing and elegant example of 12th-century Italian script and decoration. The text begins with the end of Sermo 68 by Pope Leo I (ca. 400-461), followed by the beginning of "Epistola ad Paulam et Eustochium" by the Carolingian theologian Paschasius Radbertus (785-865) on the Assumption of the Virgin, in the style of (and here attributed to) St Jerome: "misericordia dei [...] in saecula saeculorum Amen. Sermo Iheronimi presbyteri De assumptione sanctae Marie ad Paulam et Eustochium. Cogitis me o Paula et Eustochium [...] Quam sane archangelis".

While doubtless originally placed alongside a wide range of other homilies, an Italian scribe's placement of the writings of Pope Leo I and Paschasius Radbertus next to each other in a manuscript would have made thematic sense: both men's writing was focused, theologically speaking, on Christology and the simultaneous humanity and divinity of Christ, especially ruminations on the body of Christ. Though written anonymously as pseudo-Jerome, Radbertus's Epistle discusses the bodily resurrection of the Virgin Mary, on a similar theme of the physicality of the divine.